The Legend of Vox Machina: Season 1

The mercenary/adventuring group known as Vox Machina are recruited by the Tal'Dorei Council to deal with the threat of a dragon raiding the countryside. That threat dealt with (albeit extremely shambolically), the company is hired to help defend the realm on a recurring basis, thus ending their days of extreme poverty. However, a new threat arises which requires them to travel to the city of Whitestone, where team-member Percy has to exorcise some old demons.

The Legend of Vox Machina is an animated epic fantasy TV series following the adventures of a hardy band of dysfunctional adventurers as they try to make a living and find themselves repeatedly drawn into fighting threats against the kingdom and continent of Tal'Dorei, and the world of Exandria as a whole. The show is aimed at adults, featuring copious amounts of swearing and graphic violence, and occasional nudity and sex.

As has been related elsewhere, at length, the series is based on a Dungeons and Dragons campaign which was live-streamed on the Internet under the title Critical Role. As the live-stream is, how shall we say, "long" (373 hours for the first campaign alone; in comparison it would take you less than 300 hours to watch every single episode of The Simpsons ever made), the animated series is an attempt to boil down the adventures into more approachable, watchable chunks.

This approach is the cause of both Vox Machina's successes and its weaknesses. At its worst, Vox Machina is flabby and self-indulgent, with awful humour and illogical plotting that feels like it's very much been improvised on the spot and not in a good way. At its best, Vox Machina features some enjoyable animation, smart voice-acting and some impressive characterisation. The problem with the show is it's inconsistency. Jarring tonal shifts occur within scenes - sometimes within lines of dialogue - which make the show feel like it can't commit to being either a comedy with dramatic moments or a drama with comedy moments. Instead, comic moments disrupt moments of dramatic power and intense, heavy-going moments bring down comic interludes.

The main cast is fine and the characters have potential: ranger Vex, rogue Vax, gunslinger Percy, cleric Pike, barbarian Grog, bard Scanlan and druid Keyleth are somewhat archetypal, but the writers weave nice character moments for them into the story (benefitting from knowing about character revelations and backstory from later in the Critical Role campaign). Secondary characters and villains get distinctly less development: the Briarwoods, the primary villains of the season, don't develop much and the ruling council of Tal'Dorei rapidly get into a bizarre space of being thankful for Vox Machina saving their country and giving them a nice manor house and paying for their food and upkeep, but then immediately disbelieving everything they say about future threats.

The pacing is also off. The first two episodes are devoted to backstory for the team but instead of showing their origin story, it merely gives them an extra adventure fighting a dragon before they kick off the Briarwood arc. It feels like they should have either gone back further and shown how the team got together and why they've joined forces (the series notes that it's weird these rather different people would be working together for so long), or cut to the chase and jumped into the Briarwood arc straight away. It also doesn't help that the first two episodes frontline a lot of scatological jokes and tedious bickering, and some characters come across as so unlikable it's hard to care about them. Scanlan, in particular, is every D&D bard cliche ever assembled into one package, and his character doesn't really recover until quite late in the season when he gets a solo side-quest which is surprisingly entertaining.

Fortunately the third episode marks a distinct upswing in the show's quality, with Vox Machina brought into conflict against Lord and Lady Briarwood, the vampiric couple who stole Percy's inheritance and murdered his family. This gives much-needed dramatic and character weight to the show. However, the series fails to sustain the tension for the required length of time: a lot of the next ten episodes are spent running around, getting captured and escaping, inciting freedom fighters to rebel and engaging in lots and lots and lots of combat, which gets repetitive quickly. A season of 12 episodes (albeit of 25 minutes apiece) is initially refreshing in this age of decreasingly fewer episodes, but only if there is enough story to sustain that length. There isn't really here, and a few episodes mid-season bog down into filler.

The show does recover towards the end of its run, particularly the shifting focus to the dark and mysterious powers Percy increasingly exhibits as he carries out his mission of vengeance, Pike (who is separated from the team for most of the season) rejoining the group and Keyleth's growing powers and confidence. Scanlan also becomes much less obnoxious. There is a major cliffhanger ending, somewhat inevitably, but the good news is that a second season of 12 episodes is already in production.

The Legend of Vox Machina's first season (***) is entertaining, with fun action scenes, some interesting character arcs and a strong ending, but it is also inconsistent, with some pacing issues and a reliance on Dungeons and Dragons archetypes without doing anything interesting with them (in 2022 you need more than the occasional airship or use of guns to break the mould). The characters are interesting but take a bit too long to develop. This may also be an unfair comparison, but the show is coming out just two months after Arcane completely rewrote the rule book on the level of quality to expect in both animation and writing from an animated epic fantasy series, and Vox Machina can't help but feel slight in comparison. There is a lot of potential here, though, and the second season, which adapts the much larger and more epic "Chroma Conclave" arc, will hopefully be stronger. The season is available to watch now worldwide on Amazon Prime.